Stonewall (15 page)

Craig decided one Sunday to shift from camp indirection to straight-out protest. Hearing that the cops had arrived, he marched up to the boardwalk—
without
a towel over his bikini—and simply walked past them. They were initially startled, then angry. The police were used to gay men humbly begging their pardon and meekly promising never, never, never to do that (whatever it was) again. They stopped Craig in his tracks and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. Running, as always, against type, Craig returned anger with anger, berating the cops for antigay harassment.

They responded by dragging him off to a small police room behind the bathhouse and demanding his name and address, which he quickly provided; but to badger him further, they kept asking for the same information over and over. Tiring of the game, Craig finally refused to answer again. This was astounding impertinence, and the outraged cops proceeded to knock Craig around. Still, he refused to break his silence. The cops then loaded him into a van, took him to the local precinct in Queens, and locked him up. Around midnight they brought him, in handcuffs, down to Criminal Court at 100 Centre Street for arraignment.

By this time Craig had lost his shoes and shirt; he appeared before the night court judge dressed only in shorts. The judge took him into his chambers and asked sympathetic, fatherly questions. He told Craig that because he was under twenty-one he would have to appear in juvenile court in two weeks; there, the judge predicted, he would almost certainly be let off with a ten- or fifteen-dollar fine. Two gay men who had been sitting in on night court (then a popular diversion), and had heard the testimony about what this defiant gay boy had done, drove Craig back home in their car.

But the trial two weeks later did not go according to the judge's script. When Craig arrived, he learned that charges of resisting arrest and inciting a riot had been added to his bathing-suit violation. He
tried to argue his case before the presiding judge, insisting that he had not resisted arrest and could not have “incited a riot” since the police had taken him off almost immediately to their room behind the bathhouse. Then, his own volatility again getting the better of him, he heatedly told the judge that the police harassment of homosexuals at Riis Park was cowardly and indefensible.

Up to that point, the judge had been blank and uninterested. But with the mention of homosexuals, his face turned beet red, the realization having finally dawned that the teenager in front of him was one of “those” people. He banged down his gavel as Craig was in mid-sentence, and threw the book at him—which, since the judge had already dismissed the resisting-arrest and rioting charges, amounted to three days in jail or a twenty-five-dollar fine. Having been told two weeks earlier that the fine would be no more than fifteen dollars, Craig had brought exactly seventeen dollars with him. The judge banged down the gavel again and told the bailiff to take him away.

He landed in the Brooklyn House of Detention, where Sylvia Rivera, that same year of 1961, had suffered her own first incarceration. On arriving, Craig was brought into a large holding cell filled with both cops and prisoners. Suddenly a bruiser of a cop strode to the center of the room and said, “Awright, who's the one who's refusing to speak?” Before Craig could decide whether, against all experience, he should once more tell the truth, several of the other policemen pointed him out. Without another word, the burly cop strode over and hit Craig so hard on the side of his head that he landed up against the wall. Then the cop grabbed Craig's wallet and scattered the contents on the floor, yelling, “Pick them up, faggot.
Now!
” By then Craig was dripping blood and in tears. He picked up the stuff from the floor, answered when asked what his name was, and was locked up in the notorious “Queens' Tank.”

Craig spent much of his three-day sentence teaching ballet to the thirty or forty street hustlers—doubtless some of them friends of Sylvia's—locked up with him. He was a huge hit. The queens loved learning the graceful movements, and were fascinated with Craig; it seemed unfathomable that a clean-cut, educated white boy was being treated the same way they were. Which for prisoners in the Queens' Tank, as Craig quickly learned, meant no commissary privileges, no movies, and no recreation beyond the walk from their cells to meals.

When released after his three-day stint, Craig, still traumatized, went directly across the street to a hamburger joint, gobbled up several
burgers in a row and then, too upset to be thinking clearly, left the luncheonette without paying his bill. When he realized what he'd done, he was terrified that “they” would somehow come after him again and throw him back in jail—so terrified that instead of returning to the luncheonette and paying, he simply ran in the opposite direction as fast as he could.

But if the jail experience had unnerved Him, it had hardly made him contrite. He went back to his friends, back to Mattachine, back to cavorting on the subways and streets. And everywhere he went, his volatility went with him. One night in the gay Tic-Toc bar on Second Avenue, he threw a glass of wine at Farley Granger after the actor had patted his ass uninvited and made some “friendly” comment about its attractive contours; Craig took it as an insult comparable (he was also a proto-feminist) to the way straight men pawed women, and he had come to the conclusion that
nobody
, straight or gay, was entitled to put him down.

It was an attitude that deeply unnerved the man who in 1961 became Craig's lover. They first met at the popular outdoor cruising area along Central Park West in the Seventies and Eighties, immediately started to see each other on a regular basis, and soon decided that despite all their dissimilarities—the man was ten years older than Craig, had a prestigious job as an actuary, dressed in Brooks Brothers suits and had conservative political values to match—they were very much in love. The man's name was Harvey Milk.

He was a romantic, enveloping personality, and he swept Craig off his feet. As soon as Harvey got to work every morning, he would call Craig to wake him for ballet school, usually with a joke. Three or four nights a week Harvey would take him out—his treat—to assorted ethnic restaurants; Harvey loved the cultural mosaic of New York and was determined to experience at least its culinary aspects. Alternatively, he cooked Craig elegant meals in his own apartment, which was only eight blocks from Craig's. And he was quick with bouquets of flowers and gifts. Hearing that Craig, between classes, ate his sandwich-and-soda lunch on a rock in Central Park, Harvey presented him with a miniature porcelain vase, complete with paper flower, to put on the rock next to him while eating.

They had already been seeing each other when Craig got arrested at Riis Park. The episode frightened Harvey; he was afraid it might get in the papers and he might somehow be implicated. He had already been made nervous by Craig's activities at Mattachine, and his voluble insistence that
all
gay people had to stand up for themselves. When
Craig and his friend Collin hand-made some flyers for a meeting of the West Side Discussion Group and stuffed them in every mailbox in the neighborhood where two men or two women were listed as living together, Harvey was furious. He told Craig that the flyer would scare some people to death: they'd assume that the truth about them was known and their whole lives would be ruined. Craig shouted back that Harvey was simply afraid that his own cover might be blown. (Yet Craig was chastened by remembering that when he had done the same thing back in Chicago, everyone had assumed that two nelly hairdressers in the neighborhood had been responsible for the mailbox stuffings, and they had been evicted from their apartment.)

But when the relationship finally disintegrated, it was over sexual fidelity, not politics. Craig, twenty years old, found it impossible to be monogamous, whereas Harvey required monogamy as a
sine qua non
. One night when they were dining out at an Indian restaurant on Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway, Harvey—ordinarily full of playfulness—became very serious and told Craig there was something he had to discuss: He had gonorrhea. Since he hadn't been with anybody else, he held Craig responsible. Craig acknowledged that he had slept with other men, and promised that he would stop, but the relationship never really recovered. Harvey started calling every
other
morning, and then gradually, over the period of a few months, stopped calling altogether.

Craig was grief-stricken. Harvey had been the love of his life, and the loss drove him to despair. Without a satisfying job, much education, or a career, “the future now looked a total blank.” He quit ballet school, stopped seeing his friends and going to Mattachine, and finally decided to kill himself. He had attempted suicide once before, in his early teens, after he and Frank had been arrested on the street and Frank sent to jail. Put on probation, frightened, and with no one to talk to, Craig had swallowed a handful of aspirins with a Coca-Cola, having read somewhere that the combination was lethal. He had gotten sick but survived.

This time, Craig planned more carefully. He gave notice to his landlord, to his roommate Collin, and to his employer (at the time, an advertising agency). He bought a bottle of Tuinals on the black market, waited for Collin to go out to the movies one night, and then wrote him a formal note with instructions to call his aunt so she could tell his mother.

Then he began to take the pills. He had gotten through about half the bottle when he remembered that he hadn't put the note on
the chair by the door so that Collin would see it first thing on arriving home. So he jumped off the couch and left the note on the chair. Then suddenly, before he could get back to the couch, he blacked out, hitting his head on the fireplace as he fell to the floor. The last thing he could remember was lying on the floor, desperately trying to reach the rest of the pills.

For some miraculous reason, Collin came back early from the movies. Finding Craig on the floor and thinking him dead, he dialed the police, the fire department, and an ambulance. The ambulance arrived first and took an unconscious Craig to Harlem Hospital, where he was given a shot of adrenaline and where he woke up strapped down to the bed. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was a cop, and he became instantly enraged, actually breaking loose from one of the straps. Then he passed out again, and when he next woke up, he was in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue.

They kept him there for a month, the worst month of his life. Each day began with the hospital's terrifying “morning lineup”: All the patients on the floor had to stand in the corridor to hear a list read off of who was going to have electric-shock therapy that day. Craig's name was never called. Nor was he given psychotherapy. But he did get plenty of experimental drugs, which he quickly learned to put under his tongue and then, after the nurse had left, to spit out. The doctors asked Craig's father, whom he hadn't laid eyes on in years, to come down from Boston, and his mother to fly in from Chicago; when they arrived, the doctors told them that they would release Craig only if he were transferred to a private institution. Craig's father reluctantly agreed to foot the bill, and Craig was sent to the psychiatric ward at St. Luke's.

In Craig's words, “it was like going from Bed-Stuy to Park Avenue”—only two to a room, bedspreads, gourmet meals, television, and recreational therapy. To complete what felt like a restoration, Harvey came up to visit one day along with Collin; but Harvey proved uninterested in a reconciliation and it took another five years before even a distant friendship could develop.

Part of the agreed-upon deal in getting Craig out of Bellevue was that he be in psychiatric treatment for at least six months, starting while he was still in St. Luke's. From the first session, Craig adopted his silent strategy, and since the doctor never said a word either, there was no exchange between them at all. That is, until some time later, when Craig announced he was quitting and the doctor threatened to
notify the police. “You go right ahead,” Craig said, and walked out. His bluff was never called.

After three weeks in St. Luke's, Craig was released to a relative's house in Pleasantville, New York, where he stayed for a few months and then returned to Manhattan. He got a new job, this time doing clerical work for Marine Transport Lines, and his life seemed on the mend. But then Marine Transport got a big contract with the navy, requiring security clearances for all employees. Since Craig's homosexuality was a matter of police record, he couldn't get a clearance and was let go. So he went back to live with his mother in Chicago and took a job at an enameling factory. After years of being on his own, he found close-quarters living with his mother intolerable and, on impulse, accepted an invitation from a sometime admirer to join him in California. As soon as Craig stepped off the bus in Los Angeles, he knew he'd made a mistake; within a month he decamped for New York.

Arriving in the city in January 1964, he immediately plunged back into political work. Mattachine had begun to shift somewhat away from its previous conservatism, and Craig was eager to do everything in his power to accelerate the process.

YVONNE

Y
vonne Flowers sometimes went to the Village poetry cafés that had sprung up in the late fifties, and especially to the Gaslight on MacDougal Street, where Allen Ginsberg, her favorite poet, was known to give impromptu readings. (What she didn't know was that Ginsberg, in turn, idolized her other hero, Thelonious Monk.)
⁶

To accommodate her penchant for nightlife, and her part-time job as an attendant in the psychiatric ward at St. Vincent's Hospital, Yvonne had arranged to take all of her classes in the late morning or early afternoon. She would sometimes arrive at NYU without having had any sleep at all, and still high from club crawling. After class, she would crash at home for a few hours and then rush to her four-to-midnight shift at St. Vincent's. There she could easily cop a “dexie” (Dexedrine, an amphetamine pill popular in the sixties) and rev herself up again. Though she worked as an attendant, her job was in fact not
very difficult and she was surrounded by buddies. In the early sixties, numbers of students, actors, and writers worked part-time at St. Vincent's and some of the people Yvonne partied with by night worked on the same floor with her by day. Other party friends appeared regularly in the emergency room, victims of drug overdoses and suicide attempts.